You know those times when you and your siblings would be squabbling despite your mom’s repeated calls to knock it off—and finally she’d yell “ENOUGHHHHHHHH” so loud all your heads would jerk to attention?

Yeah, would love to be able to do that now, but on a much larger scale.

Seriously, ENOUGH. I don’t often let my emotions vent through my pen, but as the saying goes, “when the shoe fits…”

What a circus these last few days have been when it comes to the migrant family separation issue at the border.

I am flabbergasted at the irresponsibility of our media; at the fecklessness and opportunism of our politicians and activists; at the utter lack of ANY intellectual honesty in the lot of them.

How dare you all.

You’re either liars, or you’re intellectually lazy without a shred of genuine curiosity—neither of which is a good thing.

How dare you claim—headline after headline—that this is Donald Trump’s policy when you know darn well that it isn’t—or at least you’d know that if you did your jobs. Anyone with an internet connection, two minutes and a little curiosity can ascertain that this policy dates back to 1997; specifically, the Flores Consent Decree.

Still, the salacious headlines and social media outcry continue.

Bill Clinton tweeted that he was “thinking of the thousands of children separated from their parents at the border;” Hillary Clinton retweeted her husband, and herself called it “a humanitarian crisis.” Former First Lady Laura Bush penned an op-ed where she called it “cruel,” “immoral” and “eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent.” (Um, no—see here.) Former First Lady Michelle Obama retweeted Bush’s piece, writing “Sometimes truth transcends party.”

Here’s a laugh: Bill Clinton was president when the Flores Consent Decree came into existence and Hillary was the First Lady. Laura Bush and Michelle Obama were also First Ladies to husbands who didn’t do anything about it. I’d be remiss if I also didn’t mention that Mrs. Obama’s husband earned the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief” for “expelling more people than any other president in history.”

To paraphrase Rhett Butler in “Gone With The Wind”—Frankly ladies (and Bill) I don’t give a damn about what you have to say. YOU four, of all people in this country, ought to know better.

All Donald Trump did was enforce a zero tolerance policy—meaning statutes already in existence would be followed to the letter, and that anyone crossing the border (and refusing to go back voluntarily) would be processed per the law.

As Rich Lowry at National Review put it, “The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings [i.e. those who won’t go back voluntarily.”

If you all would pause your self-righteous hypocritical pearl-clutching long enough to consider the fact that child trafficking is a THING (like, a BIG thing) at the border, it might dawn on you that stopping to make sure who’s who, is a GOOD thing. Yeah, that’s right: children are routinely trafficked for sex across the border, or they’re used as pawns to get non-parent adult migrants across the border using previous administrations’ lackadaisical approaches.

I’m all for a way to process parents who refuse to return or who want asylum without separating them from their children, as I believe the mental and emotional anguish of this has long-term effects on the child’s well-being. But this wasn’t something the Trump administration dreamed up with the distinct goal of being cruel to the immigrant population.

And, ironically the very president being blamed for this will be the ONLY president to have acted to stop separation of families. Chew on that for a second.

Bill Clinton didn’t do it. George Bush didn’t do it. Barack Obama didn’t do it. Donald Trump just did. And he’s not only changing the policy, but he’s putting in place directives that will actually provide the MEANS by which to keep families together. (Translation: enough facilities to actually have the room to do this.)

How dare you act like every adult that crosses the border with a child is immediately—like something out of “Sophie’s Choice”—forced by SS-like border guards to give up their children. If you’ve crossed the border illegally (and did not legally and properly petition asylum), and you refuse to go back voluntarily, then you are taken down one of two paths: you are either processed for deportation, or your petition of asylum moves forward. Both of these take time, and the government couldn’t—per current (prior to Trump’s directive)—hold the children during that time.

Here’s the harsh reality: No one dragged these individuals to the border (yes I know it’s bad in Latin America—I’ve personally seen some of it), and no one forced them to refuse to return. This is a choice they’ve made; a choice many of them made while giving anywhere from $4,000 to $10,000 PER PERSON to a coyote to smuggle them across; money that could have been used towards proper immigration channels (and again, I know, it’s extremely hard). I’m simply stating that unlike the Japanese internment camps Mrs. Bush compared this to, this is, after all, a choice.

Wild horses couldn’t tear me from my children. The adults who choose separation from their children rather than returning to their countries APPALL me … almost as much as Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood’s feigned outrage over the “inhumanity” of this all. To that end…

How dare you feign outrage over what’s happening to these children, when you all openly and actively  support the murder of those children through abortion; when you’re silent at the endless violence against young people in the streets of places like Chicago; when you’re silent at the children’s lives lost at the hands of illegal immigrants; when you were silent when we all showed you the cages the Obama administration was making children wait in; when you care more about this situation than you do about our homeless and suffering veterans; when you’re silent on the plight of children whose parents commit crimes here in the U.S. and go to jail; when you were SILENT (or even mocked us) for caring about the likes of Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard.

This goes for my friends south of the border, too. How dare you criticize this when in fact it’s your economy-destroying, corrupt, violence-laden countries that have pushed these people out in the first place. How dare you.

I’ll say it again: I’m flabbergasted. Flabbergasted by Cecile Richards’ utterly oblivious tweet about the inhumanity of separating children from parents, when she makes a living off literally ending children’s lives; flabbergasted by the lack of moral character and honesty on anyone’s part; flabbergasted that in a world with more access to information than EVER before, we still can’t get out of this lemming-like mindset of following whoever screams the loudest bumper-stick mantra.

Let me end with this brilliant thought penned by Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire “This policy ought to be fixed. But lying about it isn’t designed to fix it.”

Bingo. It’s designed to destroy the opposition.

I’m not fuming because I like family separations and want to keep them going. I’m fuming because I’m sick of the lies. I’m sick of the blatant hypocrisy. I’m sick of the intellectual laziness. I’m sick of the fact that the biggest names in this throng don’t give a rat’s rear end about the children. If they did, they would have been screaming about this 20 years ago.

Seriously, how dare you all.

 

Mary Ramirez is a full-time writer, creator of www.afuturefree.com (a political commentary blog), and contributor to The Chris Salcedo Show. She can be reached at: afuturefree@aol.com; or on Twitter: @AFutureFree